Right-left immigration alliance fraying

Conservative groups are intensifying pressure on House Republicans to overhaul immigration laws this year as the push for legislation becomes more urgent.

In recent weeks, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and a broad coalition of Christian leaders flooded Capitol Hill with letters stressing the urgency of immigration reform. The tech group FWD.us released an ad blaming the GOP for stalling a rewrite.

Text Size

-

+

reset

And later Monday, the Bibles, Badges and Business group, a nationwide coalition of several hundred pro-reform faith, law enforcement and business organizations, will launch a pair of ads making the conservative case for an overhaul.

It’s the type of grassroots lobbying that would normally delight immigration reform activists. But with an overhaul seeming less likely with each passing day, liberal immigration groups say their allies on the right aren’t going far enough.

The tension is deepening among the diverse coalition of pro-reform groups, threatening to upend the unusual alliance of advocates on the left and right that at one time seemed to ensure that some type of overhaul was inevitable.

“First of all, I’m very, very grateful of what they’re doing right now,” said Gustavo Torres, the executive director of CASA in Action. But “it’s not enough. They have a lot more capacity to tell the leadership [to] solve this once and for all.”

Liberals want the conservative reformers to get aggressive and threaten Republicans politically. They want business interests to marshal the same energy for immigration reform that they did earlier this month to kill an Arizona bill that would have allowed businesses to discriminate against gays and lesbians on religious grounds.

“In Arizona, they didn’t only say it was bad to do this to the LGBT community. They said, ‘we’re going to punish you if you do this,’” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said of business interests that aggressively pushed back against the legislation. “I think that capsulation is what I would like to hear more of” on immigration.

The center-right groups don’t seem poised to change strategy for now.

“The way we see it is that the most helpful thing we can do is to work,” said Jeremy Robbins, the executive director of Partnership for a New American Economy. “There are enough members who want to pass this bill and the most helpful thing is to work with them and support them.”

The Partnership, a pro-reform group launched by former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and News Corp. executive chairman Rupert Murdoch, is in the midst of a multi-pronged campaign that aims to “microtarget” key lawmakers that they think are persuadable.

In the first part of the campaign, the Partnership focused on about 30 House Republicans with farm constituencies to highlight the agricultural case for immigration reform. The coalition enlisted about 70 farm groups and organized congressional briefings, roundtables, and other events for lawmakers.

The next phase is recruiting business groups to target about 20 key lawmakers for similar outreach efforts. Subsequent chapters will involve tech and the faith community, and the overall campaign will focus on about 50 to 60 House Republicans, Robbins said.

The pro-reform coalition’s biggest Republican allies on Capitol Hill like this approach, and said they don’t believe more confrontational tactics would be wise.

Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Calif.) said “as much as possible, we need to take the politics out of this.” And Rep. David Valadao (R-Calif.) said lawmakers have complained about the harassment strategy coming from some immigration advocates, and that those tactics – from the left or the right — was counterproductive.

“I know that there was a lot of talk of coming after me with some of the groups that … thought I hadn’t put my neck out there enough,” Valadao said. “But that, I don’t believe, would help move more Republicans.”

Valadao and Denham are two of the three House Republicans who have endorsed a comprehensive immigration reform plan written by Democrats, and have been privately lobbying their colleagues on the benefits of an overhaul.

One of the key reasons that conditions seemed ripe for immigration reform after the 2012 elections was the politically diverse array of outside groups that backed an overhaul. The evangelical community, which mostly sat out the last debate in 2007, was largely on board. The Chamber of Commerce and the AFL-CIO struck a landmark deal on a new guest-worker program that cleared the Senate – an agreement that would have been unthinkable in the last reform fight.